Linless

The scene at the Garden, one hears, has been surreal of late, and no wonder. The dog show just wrapped, with Genghis Khan, Martha Stewart’s Chow Chow, taking Best in Breed, amid protests against Mitt Romney’s maltreatment of an old Irish setter named Seamus, whom Romney once strapped to the roof rack for a family road trip to Ontario. (The protesters’ signs read “Mitt Is Mean” and “Dogs Aren’t Luggage.”) Sean Avery, the Rangers’ on-again, off-again agitator, logged more time at Fashion Week than in the penalty box. And the world’s tallest pro basketball player, according to Guinness, Paul (Tiny) Sturgess, who is seven feet eight, spent Valentine’s Day handing out roses to commuters at Penn Station while dressed in his sweats. So what if he plays for the Globetrotters? Nobody watches the Knicks.

Nobody can watch the Knicks is more like it. About two million of us couldn’t, at any rate, owing to a contractual dispute between Time Warner Cable and the MSG Network over the past seven weeks. The same goes for the Rangers, who apparently own the best record in the N.H.L. The last time they were this good, Newt Gingrich was hawking his Contract with America, and their captain, Mark Messier, was tight with Madonna. Quick: can you name the current Rangers captain? Time Warner, in its negotiations with MSG’s demanding chairman, James Dolan, seems to have been betting on the fact that you’re stumped and don’t care. That the Knicks’ roster boasted a couple of bona-fide stars, Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire, didn’t much matter, either. Dolan’s teams have underwhelmed with such regularity, in spite of ample budgets, for the past decade that local partisans can be forgiven for having adopted a more passive approach to winter fandom. Call us in April. Wake us—or, better yet, alert security—if you see Isiah Thomas.

But a lot can happen in seven weeks, or even two, as the case may be with the Knicks. Your best player can hurt his groin. Your other best player can take a leave of absence after a death in the family. And ticket scalpers’ prices, in turn, can . . . skyrocket? Incredibly, while your screens were black, and with a lineup of virtual scabs, the Knicks went on a historic run, winning seven straight games and nearly exploding the Internet in the process.

“It’s been nutty,” Spero Dedes, the Knicks’ radio announcer, said the other day, likening what he’d been witnessing (and what many hadn’t) to a Disney movie. “I was talking to Clyde Frazier, and he said he hadn’t seen anything like this going back decades.” Time Warner subscribers, catching glimpses of the headlines, may have felt a little like latter-day Rip van Winkles—groggy, befuddled at all they seemed to have missed. Had Spike Lee suddenly taken over coaching duties from Mike D’Antoni, inspiring John Starks and Reggie Miller to call off retirement? What else could explain this level of hysteria? Was Dolan buying off the refs? Or had he hired an undrafted, couch-surfing Harvard graduate with Taiwanese parents to man the point? Bingo. Naturally, the new guy outperformed even Kobe Bryant. Then Tim Tebow showed up, and started connecting with him on a series of heavenly alley-oops. Not yet, maybe, but the point guard in question, Jeremy Lin, is also a devout Christian. Welcome to Linsanity.

By late last week, with rumors swirling that Kim Kardashian had a bed available that might be more comfortable than a couch, the Rangers clearly wanted in on the action. Having already won eight of their last ten and still suffering from a deficit of attention, they took out a full-page ad in Newsday. It featured an image of their league-leading goalie, Henrik Lundqvist. Above him, in all caps, read the word “LINQVIST!” A season-ticket holder who’d been travelling for much of the blackout decided to revisit the Garden and see what was up. He was quickly disappointed. There was no residual Linsanity in evidence—no cardboard cutouts of Asian faces or bad puns—and no Lundqvist, for that matter. Martin Biron, the understudy, was between the pipes, and the visiting Blackhawks potted four goals on their first six shots. “Maybe the newspapers have been lying to us,” the spectator texted to another Time Warner client, who, back home in Brooklyn, had settled for watching “Swamp People,” on the History Channel.

The next morning, having heard that a settlement was coming, the same Time Warner client dialled customer service and asked why he couldn’t watch Linsanity in action. “I’m sorry, sir. Repeat that again?”

“Linsanity. You know, Jeremy Lin?”

“Can you give me more information on that?”

“I think you’d have to see it to believe it.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.